Conditions worsened throughout February, and the mood in London turned sullen and dangerous. Even the Savoy was reduced to candlelight, radio broadcasts were reduced, and the papers reported grimly on coal frozen to the ground outside pits and stranded on snowed-in railway wagons. The power stations went cold, and factories closed everywhere. Rations were cut again as farmers took pneumatic drills to the frozen ground to extract winter vegetables. Someone threatened to blow up the Minister of Fuel and Power. Laurence was deeply relieved when the thaw finally started.
But then, inevitably, came the floods, sweeping across miles of still half-frozen farmland and pouring into lowlying houses across the country. Laurence volunteered his help treating those suffering from the ill effects of being flooded out along the upper reaches of the Thames in Reading, Windsor, and Maidenhead, and though he directed his patients to colleagues to double-check any medications they needed, his confidence grew with each chilblain or wet cough he treated.
He was considerably less satisfied when he diagnosed six cases of whooping cough in the early stages. With so many people crammed into temporary housing, it spread like wildfire, and he was kept so busy that it was no surprise when he caught it himself. It was weeks before he was well enough to leave his sickbed.
All in all, it was the end of May before he finally made it back to Privett. He was met at the station by Althea and Millie—they had been on first-name terms since the thaw—and whisked away to the village inn. Old Dr. Nash was a curmudgeonly sort, but he seemed glad to have help, and the vicar’s Elspeth turned out to be a godsend—a befreckled slip of a girl who could make numbers dance in her head. She took over the day-to-day running of the surgery with the ruthless efficiency of a drill sergeant, and slowly Laurence began to relax into the role.
Mistle Cottage was far from habitable, but there were men eager for work, and it did him no harm in the village to be known as a generous employer. He still doubted his judgment, but he considered that a wise everyday precaution. Getting lost was a hazard, but nobody in the village seemed to mind overmuch giving him a lift back to the surgery or sending a child to walk him home when he appeared on their doorstep unintentionally. He wasn’t sure whether to be charmed or abashed when the hedgerows started sprouting very precise signage, but it did help.
“Well, if we wait for the council to put the signs back, we’ll still be waiting come the new millennium,” Althea said briskly.
It was midsummer before he first slept in the cottage. Work was still going on in the kitchen and to improve the plumbing, and connecting to the National Grid was still a faraway dream. All the same, lying there as the warm midsummer breeze crept through the window, he smiled as he fell asleep.
And he dreamed of Avery.
HIS MIDSUMMER’S night dream was still full of snow, but this time Avery did not flee him. Instead he was sitting on a tree stump in the cottage’s garden, looking down at a sprig of holly in his hand.
It was the first time Laurence had seen him clearly since Twelfth Night, and his first feeling was pure relief. Then it struck him again how good-looking Avery was. Even in his dream, he felt the blush on his cheeks as he cleared his throat and said, “It ought to be summer now.”
Avery’s head jerked up, his eyes wide. “Laurence!”
“Hullo,” Laurence said, feeling a little abashed.
“You’re here!”
“Sleeping in your bedroom. The men are still working on the spare room.”
“You’re in the cottage?” Avery looked utterly gobsmacked. “You came back?”
“I did.” Laurence offered his hand.
Avery took it, letting Laurence pull him to his feet, and stepped forward tentatively. “Why?”
Laurence shrugged. “Unfinished business.”
“That’s….” Avery looked confused.
Laurence sighed. There was no point to lying in his dreams. “I missed you.”
Avery’s eyes went wide again. “Laurence.”
“Tell me,” Laurence said, keeping hold of Avery’s hand. “Is this real? Is this you? Or am I just dreaming?”
“I dream away the in-between times. I don’t remember much of them in the waking days.”
“Remember this,” Laurence said, his heart clenching, and pulled him in for a kiss.
It didn’t quite feel real, but it was close enough that he felt Avery’s gasp against his mouth and the warm, desperate grasp of Avery’s arms closing around him.
HE WOKE smiling to the sound of a thrush singing its heart out in the garden below.
Everything was easier then, through the slow, lazy days of summer and into the first bite of autumn. He took on more and more work at the surgery, learned the names of more and more of the villagers, and dreamed of Avery more and more—Avery in the snow, framed by holly, lonely but hopeful. Laurence told him all the minutiae of his days—the peculiar patients, the misadventures in pathfinding, the conversations with Althea and Millie and Elspeth and Dr. Nash, and day by day that initial, easy rush of mutual liking and attraction deepened into something more.
Tonight he sat in the snow that never stung him, Avery’s head in his lap as he recounted the terrible conversation he had had with the vicar, who had suddenly woken up enough to wonder if Laurence might be courting Elspeth. It had not gone well.
“And that’s why the vicar is now under the impression I had my balls blown off somewhere in the North Atlantic,” Laurence concluded as Avery hiccupped with laughter against his thigh.
“Have you informed good maid Elspeth of this unfortunate event?”
“All Elspeth cares about is getting to Oxford. She eventually wants to stand for Parliament, she tells me.”
“Such a world you live in,” Avery murmured. “My sister could never have dreamed such dreams.”
“We’re a long way from fairness yet,” Laurence said, thinking of Millie and her Spitfires and the drawn-out battle Elspeth was fighting against her father’s expectations of an obedient daughter. He had spent some time trying to speak to the vicar on her behalf, which was how the entire unfortunate conversation had started.
“Still no place for men like us?” Avery asked sadly.
“Still illegal,” Laurence said, smoothing back the hair from Avery’s brow, “but they won’t hang us for it now.”
“Maybe we will live, you and I, to see that too change.”
“Such an optimist,” Laurence murmured as Avery sat up, leaning in to claim his mouth in the ghostly kiss that was all dreams offered.
IN SEPTEMBER, Elspeth won her fight and spent half her time at the surgery frantically cramming. Laurence couldn’t help much with the maths, but he gladly tutored her in the rest.
“I will repay you,” she said fiercely.
He thought nothing of it until he was roused from his meticulous and difficult record keeping by the blare of a familiar car horn. He made his way outside to see Althea parked across the road outside, her car overflowing with excited women—Millie, Elspeth, and Elspeth’s sister Jeannie, whom Laurence found slightly terrifying. Jeannie’s bike was tied precariously to the roof of the car, and Jeannie herself struggled out with an enormous case in her arms.
“Found them on the way up from the station,” Althea informed him. “Trying to bring you that on the back of the bike. Only right to offer a lift.”
“Tell him what it is!” Elspeth shrieked, diving out of the back seat to dance around her sister. “Tell him what we got him!”
Dr. Nash had been drawn out of his afternoon nap now, and the neighbors’ curtains were twitching.
Jeannie grinned and proffered the case in his direction. “Bank was chucking them out, and I remembered Elf saying you could do with one. Better off with you than down the dump.”
“Open it! Open it!” Elspeth cried.
Laurence, very aware of his audience, sat down on the step to undo the clasps of the case. Inside was a machine, slightly bigger than a typewriter but with purely numerical keys. “What is it?”
“It’s a calculator!” Elspeth informed him.
“You’re a calculator,” Laurence pointed out.
She rolled her eyes. “This one won’t snaffle your shortbread.”
Laurence glared up at her. “That was you?”